altaltingo frum ti t Viut 93noko.

MR. COODE'S REPORT ON THE LAW OF SETTLEMENT.. EN the year 1848, the Poor-law Board commissioned Mr. George Coode, of-the Inner Temple, to go into the counties of Leicester, Cambridge, and Huntingdon, and inquire into the practical effect of the Law of Settle- ment—

"1. On the labouring classes, their industrial habits and ability, the free use and circulation of their labour and the rate of wages ; their -com- mand of places of residence and Ades of consumption ; and on the comfort and condition of themselves and families_ "2. On the. employers of labour, on the state and progress of agriculture manufactures, and other industrial arts, and the application of capital to them.

"3. On.the continuance of pauperism and vagrancy. "4. In increasing the burden of taxation, local and general.

"And to ascertain the opinions of persons conversant with or affected by the Law of Settlement and Removal7 as to the nature of any change which may appear to them to be deniable, and the reasons for which they recommend such change.".

*"Beport.of George Coode..Esq., to the Poor-law Board, on the Law of Settlement and Removal of-the Poor ; being a further Report in addition to those printed in Otdered bythe House of' Commons to be printed,- 5th -August 1861. - Idn-Coede made-the inquiry, and has submitted the evidence. But he found an insuperable difficulty as to his report. "The law is of tee en.. dent a date, and too universal an operation, to allow a single ease to ea. ist through which we might discover the manner in which a labouring man would avail himeelf of the common resources of the country if he were free from these laws ; or how a parish would act in their essence ; or what would be the effect of freedom of movement on wages"-; (rte.

single practical officer, or single poor man, could.give him any evidence how the law of settlement would work on a labourer unsophisticated by "six generations of hereditary bondage." " There is no case of removal, which, if multiplied by 30,000, vrould not give a most exaggerated distor- tion of our annual crop of removals." On the whole he has no more con- fidence in the evidence he presented " than should be felt by the ex-

hibiter of a museum of monstrosities and abortions as examples of human anatomy." He has therefore puttogetiaer the results-4'a more continuous

experience, and an examination of the purposes, progress, and operation of the law from an early period, deduced from evideace contemporaneous with the various changes, and therefore exhibiting to some extant the successive conditions of our population, and of the parishes as affected by this law. The report thus made, embodying the suggestions of practical inquiry, and of the perusal of hundreds of books and pamphlets, is now published by authority. It is so interesting at the present time, and so important, that we endeavour to give an abstract of its elaborate details and arguments. A law of settlement should be essentially a law for the maintenance of peace and good order, by determining the lawful place of residence for every man. There are three principal historic epochs in the progress of legislation on this subject in England.

Under the Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Danish, and Anglo-Norman laws, (flail and interesting extracts from which enrich the Appendix-to Mr. Coolie's

Report) adoption into a local community was the essential and indispen- sable condition imposed on every freeman as the condition of his protec- tion by-the law. Each freeman was compelled to enter himself in some " burh," with the members of which he engaged in mutual pledges, by which each became reciprocally responsible for the peace of the hurh or tything, and for one another. Thenceforth his person and property were protected ; till then he was an outlaw, whom any one might slay with impunity, and whom it was the duty of every man to chase from his neighbourhood. The reputable stranger was admitted readily into the community of the burh ; and the temporary sojourner, who was duly in- troduced and answered for by a member, had all protection. Indeed, the king or eorl was the "kinsmen," the official protector, of the friendly stranger or foreigner. Such a law of domicile was then the indis- pensable condition of security and progress. It involved a. large re- straint on barbarian freedom ; but it compensated for the uni-

versal, equal, and impartial sacrifice it required, by- the universal

benefit it conferred. Indeed, the sacrifice was not really so great as one might too quickly assume : when there was scarcely any manufacture, endless traffic, there was no inducement to change the re- sidence ; above all, there had not then arisen any class of " frenlabour- ers," with strong interests to carry their best property, their strength and skill, to the most favourable market. The great classes then existing were only two—the freemen, who were at the same time freeholders of land, and the serfs. This was a genuine law of settlement—not a law, such as we afterwards meet, of "removal" : it was a harmonious portion of a polity by which a rude, turbulent, almost lawless, " unsettled " people, were to be induced to adopt the habits of civil life, to connect

themselves with the profitable occupation of the soil in defined localities'—

habits unknown to them up to that time or forgotten amidst the-vicissi- tudes of invasive migration. But with the attainment of these ends of the law, the law itself fell into -desuetude. The districts, however, which were formed by it, under the name of towns or riles, remained the inte- gral unit of our territorial division ; and the assemblages of freemen con- tinuing formally to hold the "view of frankpledge," constituted the low- est court for local administration, ages after- the view of frankpledg,e, for which they were framed, had become a mere formality, and had even perished as a form.

A second period in the history of settlement-laws had its commence- ment in those laws of Edward the Third and Richard the Second which aimed at curbing the enterprise and migratory energy of the English la- bourers, and at depressing valiant beggary and sturdy vagabondage. As early as the first half of the fourteenth century, we find the evidences of

the growth of that class which was non-existent in the preceding period—

the class of "free labourers," who were neither freeholders, military re- tainer; nor serfs. The second statute passed in the session of 134:9, (26th Edward III,) makes complaint of the grievous avarice of the labourers in husbandry, that after the pestilence, they, seeingthe necessity of masters, would not serve unless they received excessive wage; but ware rather willing to beg in idleness than labour for their living. A statute of the next session, 1350, declares that the previous ordinance had beeirineffee- tual against "the malice of servants which were idle" : it declares that servants, to their ease and singular covetesie," do "withdraw themselves to serve great men and other," unless they have " double and treble of what they were wont" ; to the great damage of the said great men and other, and the impoverishment of the commonalty. It therefore enacted that carters, ploughmen, shepherds, mowers, reapers, &c., should be sworn twice a year to obey this act ; and that none should go out of the town where he dwelleth in the winter, to serve in the summer. The legisla- tors were still defied, and again and aged renewed their "ordinances." But it was found in vain to contend with the natural consequences

of great social movements—" outrageous hire" due to the scarcity of servants" ; so the evil that "husbands and land-tenants may not pal/ their rents, nor (uneuthes) live upon their land, to the great damage as well of the lords as all the commons," (see 12 Richard II. C. A.D. 1388,) was to some extent submitted to : an act of Henry the Sixth (AA). 1427) admits that "the previous statutes of labourers be not kept

nor put in execution," "because that the punishment of the same is too hard upon the matters of such servants, forasmuch as they shall he desti- tute of servants if they should not pass-[give the go-bye to] the ordinance of the statute." The original law, moreover, had tolerated a large ex- ception. Even in these young times- of the history of our people, the counties now most noted for their energy, wealth, and power, had Bur- passedother districts of the kingdom in numbers and the enterprise of "free free labourer" class. In the act of Edward the Third, passed 1349, there was this curious deference paid to the sturdy children of the Palatinate and Scottish March counties-

"Saving that the people of the counties of Stafford, Lancaster; and Derby, and people of Graven, of. the Marches of Wales and Scotland, and other places, may come in time of August, and labour in other counties as they were wont to do before this time."

&on after the first of these tyrannical interferences with the market lee the free labourer's best property, and with the price of that property—and indeed, perhaps in consequence of those interferences—the Legislature found.that the evil of mendicancy and vagabondage was be- coming intolerable. The acts began with directions that the impotent poor, who at that time were in law licensed beggars, should "remain in the towns in which they be dwelling " •' afterwards they permitted such persons, in case the inhabitants should be unable or unwilling to support them, to "withdraw to other towns within the hundred, or to the towns in which they were born" in the twenty-second year of Henry the Eighth, the Justic.es were directed " to assign to the impotent poor the limits within which they are to beg." But the policy of these laws was not that of the laws of the preceding epoch: the people were now "settled," and inured to peaceful habits; no law of " settlement " was any longer necessary : the laws passed in the second epoch were therefore "lees correctly cha- racterized-as laws of settlement or removal, than as laws for the compres- sion of labourers and the depulsion of vagabonds." The Restoration of Charles the Second was the third epoch ; when was laid the foundation of a new and unprecedented system, the main principle of which survives to the present time. In the second year of the Restoration, a system of settlement and removal was introduced, by an act, passed suddenly and fortuitously, "which made the most effec- tual and extensive invasion of the rights of Englishmen that had ever been attempted since the Conquest." This act was the 14th Charles II, chapter 12; passed A.D. 1662. In Mr. Coode's words, "it destroyed the right of locomotion and free choice of domicile of the entire English people, excepting only the comparatively small number who could hire a tenement of the yearly value of ten pounds." The measure was a medley —the casual product of four distinct bills introduced severally by in- dependent Members, after considerably more than half the session had already passed. Two of these bills were lo al bills to improve the admi- nistration of the "relief and employment" of the poor in the Metropolis ; these two local bills furnished by far the greatest part of the act passed. The third was a bill for "general purposes," containing nothing about settlement or removal. The fourth was wholly germane to the subject, but only one clause of it survived ; and that clause was the provision "for preventing the poor by settling of them," which afforded the main principle of the act. The patchwork affair was given to the custody of the London Members; its stages in the Commons were hurried over—some of them are not chronicled in the records of the louse; its passage through the Lords was almost the work of a day ; and its ultimate con- duct through a conference between the Lords and the Commons was a pas- sage in which the usual precedents and forms were expressly waived by the Lords "in regard of the shortness of the time" remaining of the session. The phraseology of the act is singularly inaccurate; and its recitals are greedy false, in the interest of the landlord and against the free labourer. Its main recitals are, that "the necessity,.number, and continual increase of the poore " in "the whole kingdom of England and dominion of Wales,' is "very great and exceeding burdensome " ; that "the want of due regulation of relief and employment in most parishes," &c. " doth enforce many to turn incorrigible rogues, and others to perish of want'; andahat, "by reason of some defects in the law, poore people are not re- strained from going from one parish to another, to settle in those parishes where there is the best stock, the largest commons and wastes to build cottages, and the most woods to burn and destroy," whereby they became rogues and vagabonds. For the cure of these evils, it was enacted, that justices might by their warrant remove such persons "that are likely to become chargeable to the parish," and convey them to "the parish where they were last legally settled, as natives, householders, sojourners, ap- prentices, or servants, for the space of forty days." The first two of these main recitals were true; the third was false : the enactment which fol- lows them had no concernment with the evils truly recited in the first, little with those mentioned in the second, but it dealt in a spirit of con- genial tyranny with the false assumptions of the third. At the Restora- tion, Dr. Gregory King estimates the population to have been 4,885,696. Of thesei "the meaner sort "—the small farmers and tradesmen little above artisans—bore about the same proportion as in 1688, about six out of seven. This would give about 4,000,000 of persons, of whom, if they should betake themselves to a new place, it would be easy to allege that they were "likely to become chargeable." Mr. Coode remarks,. "of these the majority were undoubtedly settled in habits- of industry and thrift, unlikely to need restriction from vagabondage by the public force, and unlikely to need the aid of public charity." But at that time there really was a mass of mendicant poor, and a horde of criminal vagrants. It is probable that the class of impotent and dependent poor equalled one in sixteen of the population, or 300,000. The only estimate ever made of the sum then raised for their relief makes it 18P,000/. ; and, if the com- mon estimate of the time of the cost ofe pauper's. keep, 3d a day, be assumed as& datum, it will reduce the number of those relieved to 50,000—about a sixth of the whole number. Several statutes in the reign of Edward the Sixth, and Elizabeth, before that enactment in the forty-third year of Eli- zabeth which has become the historical Poor-law of oureode, had ordained that "-the lame, sore, aged, and impotent, be bestowed and cared for"; that the aged impotent be 'habited, to the end that they need not beg or wan- der" and that "the youth be brought up in labour, so that they be not turned into idle rogues," And while relief was made compulsory casual charity was made illegal. But in vain : from an inexorable parsimony, and from a failure of administrative machinery where the disposi- tion existed, the parishes still left unexecuted the Parliamentary decrees of mercy towards the poor and of justice against the criminal vagrant. There is•no doubt that five-sixths of the whole class of impotent and de- pendent,poor were left to beg or starve ; and as little doubt, that. the class of sturdy vagabonds and valiant beggars had become enormous in num- ber, (probably 30,000 in 1662,) and ferocious and shameless to an extent that caused the rest of the community to regard them with "loathing and a vehement abhorrence" : stringent remedies were needed, and there was abundant popular willingness for the application of such remedies. "But never," says Mr. Coode, "was the just indignation of a people, .and.their alaerity to redress.acrying evil, more abused, than when the general ab- horrence of the crimes of vagabonds was perverted into a pretext for fees tering the whole labouring people of England, by a so-called settling of the poor.'*" The act was not an act for " settling the poor," but an act for "removing all those likely to become chargeable." Now of the latter, the sick and impotent were already restrained, settled, resident, and pro- vided for. The idle vagrants-were also " settled" where born or inha- bitant for a-year' and already liable to a much more summary and severe mode of-removal. than that provided by-this act, with a whipping in every place where they loitered on the way. The act was specially aimed. at the special class of "squatters." But in reference to the extent of this evil, if it were an evil, Mr. Coode states that "a laborious search among contemporaneous evidence has been unsuccessful in bringing to light any confirmation whatever of the prevalence of the evil, or any complaint of it in one of the numberless writers who for some years before and after described, deplored, or proposed to amead the state of England, in its re- ligion, morals, politics, agriculture, manufacture, or trade."

In reference to the Poor-law of Elizabeth, one discovers that " from the day of its passing there was nothing but complaints of the resolute neglect of the iiisthms and overseers ; royal admonitions, proclamations, commis- sions, Parliamentary resolutions, ordinances and acts to compel obedience, all alike failing of their end." In reference to this law of removal—of unsettlement—what a contrast of administrative zeal !

"The oppressions and the degradation of the poor under this law of re- moval begin immediately. Their feeble attempts at evasion are relentlessly checked. Even the settlements allowed by the statute of Charles the Second are thought to be, with all the checks on them, too easily acquired, and new impediments are put in the way. When it is even found that some poor must be allowed to circulate, for the benefit of the parishes themselves, the necessary licence is so grudgingly granted as to frustrate its object, and to become a greater oppression on the most deserving poor, and only a licence

to the worthless If it were not that every penny of money mis- spent by the parish represented some cruelty or some degradation of the P°° r people, we might not regret to find that the parishes paid dearly for their indulgence. The poor-rates, which, from the first compulsory provi- sion for the relief of the poor in 1536, (27 Hen. VIII. c. 25,) to the year 1661, had not reached the annual amount of 190,000i., was quadrupled in six-and- thirty years. A century later, when we have the first authentic account of expenditure, we find the expense of litigation at least five times greater than the amount expended in setting the poor to work ; and the overseers acknow- ledge that they spend in parish entertainments three-fourths of the sum which they take credit for spending on the primary object of the Poor- laws Action and reaction tended to the like result of increased pauperism ; for in driving the stranger into another parish, he was almost certainly made a pauper there, who would probably have been an inde- pendent man elsewhere and the very practice of expelling strangers, while it arose from and increased the fallacious reliance on removal as a safeguard, begat also, both in the poor and in the parish, a stronger conviction of the claims of their own poor,' a greater supineness in admitting their demands, and acquiescing in the interested solicitations of their employers. Thus, we find the greatest vigilance in removing usually accompanying the greatest abuses and corruption in relieving. "We may safely attribute the whole of the able-bodied pauperism, which a few years since threatened to engulph the country in one vast social ruin, and the mass of the vagrancy, to the oppression of the industrious poor, the plausible claim given to the willing pauper, and the fallacious reliance be- gotten in parishes by the law of removal."

We have seen how the original law of domicile became obsolete from its being unsuited to the spirit of later times : the law of " removal " was too odious to survive, or to die the natural death of desuetude. Like the-earlier law of Edward the Third against free labourers, it had contained a con- siderable exceptional clause. It provided, again in obvious behalf of the " husbands " and lords and commons, that any person might go into any county "to work in time of harvest," provided he bore a certain certificate from the parson, and churchwarden, and overseer. The subse- quent legislation constantly fluctuated between an attempt to secure to the parish the right of removal, and a desire which was-now springing up-, to protect the poor against the hardships arising out of this removal; both these desires being largely tempered by the intention to preserve the owners of the land from the evils of "scarcity of labourers" and "outrageous and excessive hire." Mr. Coode elaborately considers the successive changes which were made, under the two heads of changes in the supposed interests of parishes, and changes in the supposed interests of the poor. The first class reached their climax in the long reign of George the Third. The latter class of changes began to prevail continuously after the 35th George III, chapter 101, which is described as "the first statute since the forty-third of Elizabeth in which the interests of the poor man had a fair consideration." The progress in each direction was varied by oscil- lations of contrary tendency. Sonic of the advancing movements in fa.. your of the poor were rather accidental than intentional: thus, in the reign of William the Third, it being found that the parishes were "burdened by many poor persons who became chargeable merely for want of work, lint who would in any other place where sufficient employment could be had support their families," provision was made to extend largely the certil- cote system. Still the extension was made in a narrowminded spirit, in the interest of the parish, and to the injury of the commonwealth ; it only served to " unsettle " the most mischievous part of the parish poor, while the meritorious and valuable labourer was jealously hedged in and detained at home.

But the 35th George III, e. 101, (1795,) came into force, and effected an immense practical change. in the law : it recited that the whole plan of certificates had been found "very ineffectual," and enacted that no man should be removeable by warrant from any place of his choice until he lost his self-dependence and became "actually chargeable." Mr. Coode says—" As the people of England and Wales had always numbered at least ten, perhaps sixteen self-dependent men to one pauper, this law was an emancipation at once of at least nine-tenths of the nation, probably of eight millions of people who had previously been under a legal disability to remove." Describing its effects, he states that "a most careful search among the debates and Parliamentary papers, the pamphlet,' on Poor-laws and Vagrancy, and the domestic records of the succeeding five years, has failed to bring to light a single remark in the way of complaint against the observed effect of this seemingly vast experiment : on the other hand, Mr; Pitt., in the following year, approved of the change, and declared himself disposed to think that they had " not yet gone far enough." In the year 1809 some further advances were made—the sick poor were made rrre- moveable dining their sickness ; in the reign of the late King further ameliorations were made—such as the preventing of the separation of

&c. and in the present reign, by the 9th and 10th Victona,' 1846, arnoreepther enactments in direct favour. of the poor, it was enacted

that no person, whether chargeable or not, should be removed from the place where he had been resident five years.

Time must elapse before the full tendencies of these later enactments are developed. One of the iniportazit social modifications to be worked by then will be in reference to the -mode of hiring and service among agricultural labourers. At present the effect in this direction is but tri-

, . .

"A* fieni Wry and three-quarters of observance of a most stringent policy, coming home to the pockets of every head of a family, at least of every eel, ployer bf any servant whatsoever, produces effects that no other legislation can efface. The fear that in hiring a servant, or treating a servant in any way that might be construed into a yearly hiring, the employer, for the tem- porary advantage of the service which he could obtain nearly as well in another way, should subject himself and all his parish to a permanent charge, operated immediately to put an end throughout England andWales to all permanent and annual hiring&

"The practice of keeping in the same house, whether of the gentry, the farmers, the tradesmen or the artisans, of young lads and maids as part of

the family, which had tradesmen, almost universal before, was now as universally abandoned ; an irretrievable national loss, by which a valuable moral edu- cation and an economical and industrial training of the very poorest and most numerous class of our people was sacrificed for ever. The servants thus thrown out, the young people thus cut off from permanent, comfortable, and im- proving employment, were made an encumbrance of the overpeopled cottages of their families, idlers on the roadside or common, and, with fearful rapid- ity, the tenants of the parish-houses and the dependents on parochial relief. The more mature in age became the frequenters of the ale-shops; the com- plaint of the growth of which accompanied the progress of ablebodied pau- perism, and of poaching and other rural crimes, from this time forwards. Ideantime, all the habits of industrial life were changed. Houses were al- tered in their structure or their uses, new houses were built with diminished accommodation for in-door servants ; every service was shortened and moulded to this pernicious law' every, youth and maiden was less serviceable, and less desirable as an inmate of a decent family ; a wide distinction of habits grew up, more by deterioration of the servants than by refinement of their em- ployers, between the two classes; until at length the young unmarried people became, in rural places, mere outcasts, the last to be employed and the first to be pauperized, as they still remain, whenever and wherever work is scarce for the heads of large families. "Such results, inducted into the social system by 172 years of vigilant and resolute persistence, were not to be cured by the removal of the first cause. It was easy to repeal this pernicious settlement, but it was impos- sible to restore the old relations -the familiar habits of the master and his servant, their almost equal moral elevation, the personal attachment to the latter, the ancient household accommodation for him, the routine of occupa- tions, by which the permanent servant had always a profitable occupation, in-door or out, whatever the season whatever the weather ; above all, it WaS impossible to make the demoralized pauper either willing or fit to be restored to his ancient relation to his employer. As might be expected, therefore, the influence of this repeal has been but little. Few more yearly engage- ments or more permanent employments Aire found to take place since than before 1834; and if any improvements have taken place in the habits of the serving class in rural places, it is to be referred, not to this change, but to the more general improvement in the administration of the Poor-law."

The later history of the law of settlement has been the best comment on the policy of its original enactment : it has been the history of uni- versal failure mischief, amendment, and repeal. It must be allowed, says Mr. Coode, that the law has been humanely and extensively miti- gated; it may even be allowed that if the law, such as it now is, were now enacted as a restraint on a people heretofore free, its effect would not be considerable.

"But wholly different is the effect of maintaining the law. The people have been so formed to it, that they snore easily understand its old and ex- perienced severity, than its new and untried leniency. The terrors of the cart and the whip relentlessly used for a century and a quarter, not on paupers, but on bold, honest, and industrious men, seeking their welfare by every laudable art known to them, had effectually subjected the spirit of our popu- lation."

Mr. Coode takes in succession the various objections which have been raised to the entire removal of the remaining fragments of the law of settlement and removal. The shrewd and practical Dr. Burn, in 1769, "doubted the prudence of letting loose the whole labouring class of England and Wales, with no better bulwark against universal vagrancy than the overseer and the constable." But, in 1795, the bold and not less generous measure of 35th George III, cap. 101, gave an answer to those doubts, by making every man not "actually chargeable" free to go and stay wherever he likes. The Poor-law Commissioners have also (in their Report for 1834) countenanced the objection to total removal of settlement, that the fear of removal deters labourers residing at a dis- tance from their settlements from becoming chargeable. But Mr. Coode replies, that for this end the suggestion of the Commissioners themselves, of the plan of setting the poor to work in workhouses, is a preferable means ; it is wholly free from the numerous and serious evils which the Commissioners show to be the effects of the settlement law. It is conjectured, however, that accumulations and congestions of the people would result, most injurious, especially to the manufacturing towns. The conjecture is thus met. Such accumulations must occur in parishes which are retrograde, stagnant, or progressive. To the first and second the repeal would be wholly advantageous : such parishes would derive help from the setting free of their settled paupers, and the aiding of them to emigrate into other parishes. All their evils are due to the existing settlement of their paupers. To progressive parishes the repeal would be equally advantageous. Of course their own labourers -would cease to be chargeable, as labour rose in value ; and the help to immigration which would be effected by repealing settlement would be what they desire. Where progress is mterrupted, removal is illusory, through its dilatory operation, compared with the quicker operation of natural causes under perfect freedom of dispersion. Removal under war- rant would be severe and injurious in its completeness: the natural dis- persion would be towards the points, perhaps adjacent ones, whither pros.. parity has transferred itself; the dispersion under warrant might be to a point injuriously distant, and also more retrograde than the one whence the removal is effected.

Having disposed of all the objections to total repeal of settlement and removal, Mr. Coode pictures some indirect benefits,-the better reward to the really worthy labourer, who is no longer cooped in his parish by those who prize him ; the better spirit of public charity from the diminution of pauperism; and the necessarily effective administration of the laws against idle vagrants. Very prominently among these indirect benefits he places the effect, that it wreadriWa 'Elsa disilatql allatome think it wcildd ieaddi Mallen:40k 'the conversidrill Ifiniati.,i,flittrrifii* for rating,' "or &erne, eqUiialent arrangement, for raiSing a ceennAVAind::' Ile advances a proposal of his own for accompliahine this desire:Melon'ud without falling into the injustice of adhering to present valuations inifimes to come, when the relative wealth of the different/parishes may be eitremely different. Two intermediate courses which have been suggested are then disposed of-I. Exclusive birth-settlement; 2. The merging of parochial settle- ment in a Union settlement. Against the first plan he objects, that the birth-settlement is oftenest of all the most unjuSt : it is the most remete. Against the second he objects, that while it would merge the jealousies of parishes, it would aggravate to their fullestriasible extent the same setts of jealousy between unions. Th'e 'tidiaatage fo the labourer would be slight, to the Pariahes only secondary ; but the total abolition would at least be universal and primary to the labourer : and in reference to the duties and expenses of unions, it would transfer seventeen-eighteenths of the business of contest and litigation from the Overseers to the Board of Guardians; only for the purpose of getting rid of one-eighteenth. The apparently exceptional cases of Scotch and Irish inimigrants are considered. It is shewn. that the law of retneval is, Under ordinary Cir- cumstances, an aggravation of Irish vagrancy in England-to send him back at our cost in the autumn is a premium on his Coming in the sum- mer ; and that in eases of emergency, such as folio* on famine or pesti- lence the law of removal is illusory. The late' Mr. Rushton of Liver- pool declared, that in the dearth of 1849, at Liverpool, the law proved entirely "a dead letter." It should also be remembered, that neither Ire- land nor Scotland possesses a law of settlement or removal against migrants from this country. Rapidly and strikingly recapitulating the various conclusions which he has established, Mr. Coode founds .on them his reeotaineadation.-to roped the power of removal by warrant; and to extend the repeal to Sootch,Imh, the Islanders, and vagrants. If "removal" be abolished, it will be un- necessary to provide especially for "settlement," Finally, as. the right of free settlement may operate to the injury of some *ore accessible parishes, and as it would be very beneficial that every union should be- come one parish, but as to effect that suddenly might work injustice to particular parishes, he recommends also enactments, "Every union be on and after the • day of an union for rating, according to the provisions of the Poor-law Amendment dispensing with the consent of the Guardians.

"That all its expenditure be provided for by a conamon fund.

"That this common fund be raised for the „drat (Say twenty-seven) years by rates made in each parish, approximating to an equal union-rate by (say one-tenth) of their differences euery three years. "That in the year (say 1.8.78) and thenceforth,. the common fund shall be raised by an equal union-rate."